minds.ai recently announced that it has raised $5.3 million in seed funding to drive innovation in the application of AI in semiconductor manufacturing. This funding round was led by Monta Vista Capital, with other investors, including Momenta, joining the round. In connection with the funding round, minds.ai welcomes Venkatesh Shukla from Monta Vista Capital and Michael Dolbec from Momenta to its board of directors.
The CHIPS Act in the U.S. and the European Chips Act highlighted the importance of semiconductor manufacturing as the most critical smart manufacturing industry segment. And McKinsey & Company estimated that semiconductor manufacturing will become a trillion-dollar industry by 2030. It is also one of the most complex manufacturing processes in the world, which requires hundreds of process steps in hundreds of tools with many dozens of scheduling, prediction, and meeting of time constraints between steps in real-time across the entire fab.
This leads to a need for human intervention. However, human capacity is necessary to make informed decisions in a complex and rapidly changing environment, resulting in inefficiencies. Considering the investment of tens of billions of dollars in modern fabs, every efficiency improvement has a major impact on the bottom line.
So minds.ai is bringing its proven experience in applying deep learning to solve business and technical problems for dramatically improving the efficiency and productivity of large-scale semiconductor manufacturing processes. And The minds.ai Maestro end-to-end solution integrates seamlessly into existing workflows – improving the efficiency and productivity of fab manufacturing processes using supervised learning, reinforcement learning, and generative AI.
1.) Improved targeted key performance indicators – General and data science managers in semiconductor fabs will gain efficiencies in throughput, fault detection and classification, preventive maintenance planning, reduction of wafer scraps, and prediction of wafer lot processing times.
2.) Faster and more productive planning and investment – Business operations professionals can do capacity planning, product mix allocation, and capital investment planning and optimization quantitatively and more rapidly than with spreadsheets alone.
3.) Deep learning tools and established AI expertise – C-suite leaders can leverage minds.ai’s technology to assist with high-value programs ranging from product mix planning to demand forecasting and training of operators.
KEY QUOTES:
“Increasing the efficiency of semiconductor manufacturing operations is one of the most challenging programs in the industry. Traditional approaches don’t suffice and humans alone cannot make informed decisions using them. This is an intractable problem and minds.ai has created a solution portfolio with proven results for this sector.”
— Venkatesh Shukla, Founder and General Partner of Monta Vista Capital
“With our focus on smart manufacturing, Momenta sought an investment to apply AI to semiconductor operations. We’ve found exactly that in the highly skilled team and groundbreaking product suite of minds.ai Maestro.”
— Michael Dolbec, Managing Partner of Momenta
“We’re on a mission to completely transform the semiconductor industry through the application of various deep learning techniques. These technologies are key to solving some of the biggest pain points in this sector, with the ability to deliver results that existing tools could never achieve. The investment from Monta Vista Capital and Momenta will help accelerate our journey.”
— Sumit Sanyal, CEO of minds.ai
